DigiEcoQuarry

Tap the full potential of digital quarries through breakthroughs in process digitalization and automation.

Challenge

DigiEcoQuarry aims to design, develop and validate in 5 pilot environments an Innovative Quarrying System (IQS) comprising sensors, processes, tools and methods for data capture, processing and sharing to provide integrated digitalised, automatic and real-time process control for aggregates quarries.

Solution

Sigma will bring AI to the quarry processes by analyzing data coming from various sources in an advanced data architecture framework called the IQS (Intelligent Quarry Systems). The IQS features a data lake to gather data in heterogeneous formats, an IoT Platform gathering data coming from sensors installed in the quarry mobile and fixed equipment, and a data warehouse used to store processed data coming from the AI models and algorithms.

Sigma will develop models, services and algorithms that will help quarry managers and related partners to make better decisions, obtain alarms, analyze historical information around the following main areas: risk analysis, specialized information search using NLP, equipment predictive maintenance, stock forecast and management and computer vision applied to the quarry installations to analyze distances, volumes and possible security threats.

Results

The DigiEcoQuarry project runs from June 2021 to May 2025 and includes ten work packages (WP). 
We have achieved the following objectives to date:

  • From WP1, we 1) Defined the requirements of the smart, sustainable digital quarries in compliance with European strict legal and environmental requirements; 2) Ensured that all the objectives are related with the definition of the specific requirements for the global project and particularized for each pilot site and for each aggregates production process by developing. an evaluation of the initial starting infrastructure and services (state 0) of pilot sites; 3) Ensured that all requirements were defined with a detailed characterisation of critical processes along the quarrying value chain; 4) Defined specific requirements for each Technological development and finally 5) Specified the requirements for the evaluation of the degree of fulfillment of the project’s objectives. 

 

  • Within WP3, we identified the key data inputs and outputs from cyber and physical quarrying system for the different quarry processes that are necessary for implementing the concept of the smart, sustainable digital quarry, 

 

  • And in WP4, we have 1) defined the ICT requirements for the IQS, and 2) carried out a comprehensive study of the inventory of the existing and operational ICT assets, as well as 3) benchmarked most promising IoT and data frameworks and off-the-shelf tools as baseline for the different types of solutions and 4) defined the architecture and the solution to integrate smoothly existing platforms.

 

The Horizon 2020 project reports and deliverables can be found here.

 

Funded by

 

This project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020
research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101003750

 

Partners

 

This project includes” over 25 European partners in the quarry and digitalization industries. For more information, please visit the DigiEcoQuarry website ->

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